All those flooded valleys with their towns and farms were dislocating for people and quite sad even if some argue it was necessary.
Some would argue that the best parts of the South are the ones that were flooded.
Coal slurry retention pond failures, high prices, no competition, yep it's an FDR boondoggle. 0%.
Any utility that has burned coal in the past certainly is struggling with coal pond issue at this point, hardly unique to the TVA.
Necessary at the time, as it brought electrification and economic development to a region of the country that severely needed it.
However, we need to recognize the TVA for what it is, a power company, more so than a coherent economic development strategy for the region in the 21st century. Of course, TVA (like all power companies) continues to play a big role in economic development across the region, but the only reason it exists today is so that Southern politicians can have a direct hand in greasing deals by slashing power rates for their favorite campaign contributors.
Yeah, basically this.
It did develop an area of the country that would have been difficult to develop otherwise, even if they're filled with racist hicks. Hard to imagine Huntsville or Knoxville to be anything like they are today without the TVA.
Somewhere I have a really cool reproduction of a newspaper ad made by a coal company attacking the TVA for being unfair competition and putting coal miners out of work. Of course, initially the TVA was large scale hydro, which could really only be done with large scale public investment. Once that was maxed out and demand rose they became a customer of coal which they're now exiting. The boondoggle part really came with nuclear, when they spent a ton of money on plants that would never come into existence and the ones that did had huge cost overruns. Again, you can look at other pubic utilities that made the same errors.
I voted 75%.
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